phone interview about 25 minutes. First the employer described the company and position. Then he asked me about one of my mobile projects on the resume. Then some follow up about the project. At last, he asked me if I have used some tools like git.

I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks – interviewed at BlackBerry in February 2015.

Interview Details

I applied via the job portal of my university. I was promptly contacted by the Manager who was looking to hire for his team. He scheduled a phone interview with a senior developer on his team. It was a typical one hour phone screening interview. The senior developer started off by giving me a brief description of the nature of the work then moved over to the languages I could code in and finally onto a brief description of a project that I felt was most relevant to that discussion. This lead to an onsite interview with a developer, a team lead, a manager, a director and a VP. This lasted for about four hours.

The folks over at BB are very nice and treat you with respect and through professionalism. During the onsite interviews the manager gave a brief introduction of the team, the position and expectations from the new hire. This was followed by a technical interview by one of the developers on the team. He quizzed me on basic questions like sorting an input file and designing an efficient solution for implementing a contacts search for a phone; the kind that starts prompting you names based on the characters/numbers you have enter into the search field. I met with the team lead after this interview. He discussed relevant projects and work experience (internship and CoOp in my case. I had developed desktop applications in VB .Net for a Factory Automation team in the semiconductor industry.) and project work (focusing on experience following SW Dev/Engineering practices and models, conflict resolution, requirements gathering and documentation for long term support). This round was followed by a meeting with the VP. I feel he tried to gauge my expectations from the job, ambitions in my professional life and the general direction in which I wanted my career to grow. The last round was to analyze my critical thinking involving a puzzle/brain teaser. I am sure the problem he posed had no solution. This one made me nervous.

BB takes about 2 weeks to ponder over your interview.

Interview Questions

Describe how a smartphone would boot up?When do you think all the drivers would be loaded?Answer Question

Given an input file of characters produce an output file that is sorted (English alphabet considered for the sake of simplicity. The o/p would look like: all the a's then all the A's then the b's then B's ....) State the data structures that'd be used, the reason for using them and the time complexity of the solution.Answer Question

Design a contacts search for a phone. The solution should prompt you with all the contacts that'd match the characters keyed into the search box.Eg: For a contacts list having Adam, Alex and Arby's, keying in A should suggest Adam, Alex, Arby's while keying in Ad should suggest only Adam.State and explain the choice of data structures and explain the time complexity of the solution.Answer Question

How does process scheduling work?How does the OS know that it's time to run the scheduler?What is a deadlock?When does a deadlock occur?What is priority inversion?What is a possible way of solving the problem of priority inversion?Answer Question

How did you gather the requirements for the applications that you developed during your internship?How did you ascertain if what you understood matched what the customer asked for?(did you and the customer sign off on a req doc?)How did you make sure that what you were developing was stable and matched user expectations? (did you prototype and unit test? how?)Answer Question

I applied through college or university – interviewed at BlackBerry in January 2015.

Interview Details

Briefly spoke about some personal questions and they asked me some legalese type things about my employment eligibility. No coding interviews on this one as it seemed to be more of a first screen, however I have been contacted again for a phone interview. No coding questions got asked but I imagine that will come later.

Find the job through school co-op website. apply for it. wait the response for like 3 months. interview though phone. the interview took me about 30 minutes. no warm-up questions. the interview started with a "tell me about yourself" questions. The interviewee sounded so bored with my answers. He asked many repeated questions about my past work experience.

Interview Questions

what is the most stressful thing in your past work experience?Answer Question

I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks – interviewed at BlackBerry.

Interview Details

Initial communications began at the university careers fair, followed up with a phone call from Blackberry in Bellevue, WA. Interview was scheduled in the following week, for a summer internship position that would begin a few months after the screening process. There were also the usual series of background checks, but those were carried out after the interview process ended.

Interview Questions

Immediately write code with a sharpie without any points for reference, timed under 5 minutes. There was a simple scenario given, but it did not matter that much in reality.Answer Question

I applied online. The process took 4 weeks – interviewed at BlackBerry.

Interview Details

Talked with recruiter at campus who said BlackBerry wasn't accepting resumes but told me to apply online. After I applied I emailed her later and she responded that the interview process would begin soon. Got contacted for a phone interview with the manager. Interview began with explaining points on my resume while the manager looked for a point to segue into the technical interview. Questions were very technical, asking about different aspects of Mechanics of Materials (beam bending) and a general physics question about buoyancy. Manager was more interested in how I came about finding the answer rather than whether I was right or not. I was contacted a couple weeks later over phone offering me the position.

Interview Questions

When you fix a beam to a wall and add a shear force at the end of the beam, where does the beam fail first?Answer Question

Which type of beam would be stronger against a shear force at its end: a hollow circular tube or a solid cylindrical bar both with the same cross-sectional area?Answer Question

If you have a boat in water and you want to sink the boat, how would you go about doing it? How does the boat stay above water normally?Answer Question

I applied online. The process took 4+ weeks – interviewed at BlackBerry.

Interview Details

I was an intern for two semesters before I applied back for the same team after graduation, so my experience may be shorter than others.

My interview for the intern position was a phone screen that lasted a little longer than an hour with 4 developers and 2 managers. The managers explained the projects that the respective teams owned while the developers asked questions. The questions mostly consisted of object oriented design principles of Java and regular expressions.

I applied through the public employment portal. The process took close to a month from scheduling an interview, through the background check, until I had an offer. The interview consisted of 6 rounds, 4 of them being technical questions or riddles and the other two regarding my experience outside of BlackBerry.

Interview Questions

For my internship the most expected question was whether or not interfaces are supported in C++. I answered, no that's a Java only construct. The interviewer then asked if I was familiar with the virtual keyword in cpp, at which point I realized that you could create an equivalent of a Java interface in cpp by creating an abstract class with only pure virtual member functions. A great question.

For my full time interview, there a few trickster questions regarding memory management in C/C++ (e.g. when and where will this program crash, where is the memory leak, etc.) as well as a few general binary search tree and linked list questions. Expect a few questions regarding running time and concurrency, but nothing too grueling.Answer Question

Negotiation Details

The negotiation phase was simple enough, but seemed to draw out for too long. They offered me more than my ballpark figure was with good benefits. The longest and most grueling part was the background check.

Glassdoor has 964 interview reports and interview questions from people who interviewed for jobs at BlackBerry in United States. Interview reviews are posted anonymously by BlackBerry United States interview candidates and employees.